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Saturday, March 1, 2014

[Rant] Finally decided to Jailbreak the iPhone 5S

When I Jailbroke my iPhone 4S last time, it got a bit slow (not all the time) and the battery seemed to do weird things. One day I would get decent battery life, the next day the battery life would be so poor. I couldn't find the culprit. When Apple released iOS 7, I switched to it ASAP, which made me give up the Jailbreak.

I was never happy with the performance of iOS7 on the iPhone 4S. When I upgraded to the iPhone 5S, I immediately felt the speed improvements. But even then, the UI on iOS 7 is laggy. Actually, it is the animation part that is laggy. The fade in and out part. Sometimes it drives me insane! I like stuff that works quickly - stuff that responds quickly. Even if it is only a split second, I can very much notice that.

There is only one fix for this. Jailbreak and use a tweak that speeds up animation. But I don't know if the tweaks available on Cydia for this purpose are compatible with iOS7. Well, there is only one way to find one. It's time to Jailbreak and see.

So I first made a backup of the iPhone using iTunes. Then I downloaded evasi0n 1.0.6 which supports iOS 7.0.6, which is the latest version as of this post. Before open evasi0n tool, I read the Readme file. It said that if I had updated the OS using over the air updates, I should do a full restore using iTunes before using evasi0n because it can give errors otherwise. So I did just that – fired up iTunes and Restored the phone. I let it restore the settings, files and apps from the backup before opening evasi0n.

Once all that was finished, I closed iTunes and fired up evasi0n tool. Jailbreaking has become so easy nowadays. All you have to do it press a button on the tool and tap on an app which it installs in the phone and you are done.

Cydia was installed alright. Then I referred to this earlier post for the list of jailbreak tweaks that I would want to install. I installed Accelerate, Nitrous, iFile, Adblocker and Activator. They all seemed to support iOS7 on the iPhone 5S. They even installed fine. But the most important app of them all, Accelerate did not work properly.

When I went into iOS settings to chance the preferences of Accelerate, I got the following error.

There as an error loading the preference bundle for Accelerate.

Sadness! There seems to be some incompatibility with Cydia Substrate 0.9.500 or Preference Launcher. I didn’t feel like digging too much into that mess. So I searched for another app that could do the same thing as Accelerate could, and came across NoSlowAnimations. This is a simple app to speed up the UI animations, but it is not as functionally rich as Accelerate. Well, at least it does most of what I want to do. But I cannot speed it up high enough so that it doesn’t show any of the animations. Still, it’s better than nothing.

Speed up iOS 7! NoSlowAnimations

I will frequently check if they release a version of Accelerate that works on my phone, and switch to it when they do.